The diversity and quantity of chemicals released into the environment has increased dramatically in recent years. These chemical emissions and their impacts are numerous and complex. These emissions have increased concerns about their adverse effects on their surroundings. These emissions have also resulted in increased regulatory and economic requirements for monitoring and treating the pollution. Conventional sensor devices for these emissions are small in size and communicate untethered over short distances. Typically, these conventional sensor devices consist of sensing units, data processing, and communication modules. In an attempt to support risk assessment and environmental sustainability, a large number of these conventional sensor devices can be deployed over large areas to collaboratively monitor the impact of human activity on air, water, soil and sediments by providing in situ, real-time data about the status of the environment, including bioavailability and mobility. Employing large numbers of these sensors can provide a finely resolved moment-by-moment analysis of changes in air quality, as well as potential exposure patterns. Large scale deployment of these conventional sensor devices, however, requires a large number of batteries, which may be toxic for the environment, and a large staff to maintain the sensor nodes for these environmental air quality monitoring systems.
Thus, a multi-parametric environmental diagnostics and monitoring sensor node solving the aforementioned problems is desired.